The old algorithm was found to not be the usual CRC-32 algorithm, used by
Ethernet et al. We were using a non-reflected lookup table with code meant
for a reflected lookup table. That's a strange combination that AFAICS does
not correspond to any bit-wise CRC calculation, which makes it difficult to
reason about its properties. Although it has worked well in practice, seems
safer to use a well-known algorithm.
Since we're changing the algorithm anyway, we might as well choose a
different polynomial. The Castagnoli polynomial has better error-correcting
properties than the traditional CRC-32 polynomial, even if we had
implemented it correctly. Another reason for picking that is that some new
CPUs have hardware support for calculating CRC-32C, but not CRC-32, let
alone our strange variant of it. This patch doesn't add any support for such
hardware, but a future patch could now do that.
The old algorithm is kept around for tsquery and pg_trgm, which use the
values in indexes that need to remain compatible so that pg_upgrade works.
While we're at it, share the old lookup table for CRC-32 calculation
between hstore, ltree and core. They all use the same table, so might as
well.
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